IBM & Partners to Fight COVID-19 with Supercomputers, Forms COVID-19 HPC Consortium

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted multiple business events as well as high-tech product launches in the recent months and has all the chances to disrupt the world’s economy quite drastically. So in a bid to better better understand the disease and develop treatments as well as potential cures, IBM this week established the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which will be enlisting the United States' various public and private supercomputers and compute clusters to run research projects related to the disease.

Together with IBM, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy and others, the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium pools together 16 supercomputers with that together offer a total of over 330 PetaFLOPS of compute power, a combination of 775,000 CPU cores as well as 34,000 GPUs. The systems will be used to run research simulations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. All of these virtual experiments are meant to greatly speed up research of the COVID-19 disease as well as possible treatments. Eventually, the knowledge obtained during this work could allow to develop vaccines and other treatments against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus itself. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 HPC Consortium will first prioritize projects that can have ‘the most immediate impact’. Researchers are advised to submit their proposals to the consortium via a special online portal.

So far, IBM’s Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has enabled researchers from ORNL and the University of Tennessee to screen 8,000 compounds to discover those that are most likely to bind to the main “spike” protein of the coronavirus, and thus prevent it from infecting host cells. To date, scientists recommended 77 promising small-molecule mixtures that could now be evaluated experimentally.

The pool of supercomputers participating in IBM’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium currently includes machines operated by IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), Argonne National Lab (ANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and other technology companies (including Amazon, Google, Cloud, and Microsoft).

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Sources: IBM, COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium